Anti-Machiavel
Frederick the Great
Top 10 Best Quotes
“A private individual who has the misfortune to have been born with this lust for power, is more miserable than mad. He is dulled to the present, and exists only in future or imaginary times; nothing in the world can satisfy him, and the drunken ambition which has mastered him always adulterates the softness of his pleasures with bitterness.”
“Just as people are born, live a time, and die by diseases or old age, in the same way republics are formed, flower a few centuries, and perish finally by the audacity of a citizen, or by the weapons of their enemies. All has their period; all empires, and largest monarchies even, have only so much time: the republics feel continually that this time will arrive, and they look at any too-powerful family as the carriers of a disease which will give them the blow of death.”
“It is enough", this malicious man tells us, "to extinguish the line of the defeated prince." Can one read this without quivering in horror and indignation?”
“How could a republic resist, for all time, every cause which undermines its freedom? How could it always contain the ambition of the would-be princes which it also nourishes? How could it withstand for long the seductions of the usurper, the practical deaf person, and the corruption of its members, as long as self-interest will be all-powerful in men? How can it hope to always win, or even leave with honour, every war which it will have to support? How will it be able to prevent these annoying economic situations that come with its freedom, these moments critical and decisive - these and other chances from which arise both the courageous ones and the corrupt? If the troops are ordered by loose and timid heads, it will become the prey of its enemies; and if they have as the head of their soldiers men that are vigorous and bold, these same men, after having been vital in the war, will be dangerous in peace.”
“But France's powerful armies, and a very large number of fortresses, ensure that the French Sovereign will possess the throne forever, and they do not have anything to fear now concerning internal wars or their neighbors invading France.”
“An Englishman had the insanity to kill himself a few years ago in London; on his table was found a note where he justified his action, which said that this way, he would never become sick again.”
“(About Cesare Borgia) What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes? Such was the man that Machiavel prefers to all the great geniuses of his time, and to the heroes of antiquity, and of which he finds the life and action make a good example for those that fortune favors.”
“What if Machiavel himself could see the new shape of the body politic of Europe, including the many large princes who appear now in the world that were not there then, if he could see the power of the firmly established kings, the new manners of diplomacy, and the balance of power that is the foundation of the alliance of some weighty princes to oppose the ambitious, and the purpose of which is accepted by the world?”
“We humans are foolish in many ways: we want to conquer all as if we had all time, as if our lives did not have any end. Thus, our real time passes too quickly, and often when one believes that they are working only for themselves, they are in fact working for unworthy or ungrateful successors.”
“There is no feeling more central to our being than the desire for freedom. From people that are most organized to those that are most barbarian, all are penetrated by it; because, as we are born without chains, we demand to live without constraint. It is this spirit of independence and pride which produced so many great men in the world, and who gave place to the republican governments, which establish a species of equality between the men, and bring them closer to a natural state.”
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Book Keywords:
french-revolution, cesare-borgia, politics, machiavellianism, niccolo-machiavelli, republics
